Encryption One

Reading for November 22, 2009

At the most interesting parts of conversations, which brought me edging closer and closer to hear more clearly, they broke into Polish! Secret codes and encrypted messages shared right in front of me. I understood nothing. Sure I heard Polish all around the neighborhood and in church, but I didn’t understand it. This never failed to infuriate me.

And there’s another thing. Some time last year after the religion class’ little oh, by the way to reach life’s goal of getting to heaven, there’s a load full of stuff to do teacher dinged us again. Sister Felicia was telling us about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the many many reasons we have for honoring her. Sometimes, she said, the church picks out one of the most important reasons and makes a special day just for that. At the time last year we were about to celebrate the feast day of the Immaculate Conception; so, sister went on to explain its meaning. Mary, and only Mary, she went on to say started her life inside her mother without any sin, or pure, or Immaculate! I thought “like cool” that’s neat. Good for her. The hammer came down when Sister followed that with saying that everybody else that was born, came into the world in a state of sin. I thought, hey; wait just a minute, here! To me, this was the same as saying we all somehow arrive at this place, and then the very first thing that happens to us is that we are given a gigantic chore list – because we are flawed or something like that; and it was pissing me off. To add to all this, I began thinking, hey, I didn’t volunteer to be born, and I didn’t know of anyone else that did.

In some strange way, these very things that were annoying me, were also giving me sense of purpose. An internal directive emerged that overrode the questions of where am I and how did I get here – and inspired me to deal with the fact that I am here and I have things to do…………..like learn Polish. I thought of one of my favorite television shows: Flash Gordon. I decided I was going to be like Dr Zarkov. Zarkov had a limitless number of cosmic resources and inventions he used to save the earth from peril. I was going to invent and/or decode things to save life on our planet from that birth chore list for the flawed; and, then all of us could just be happy.

The third part of Sister Felicia’s catechismal dogma: “to serve God” then appeared in my mind and identified itself as that very inventing, decoding and saving the world. Okay, that still works.

Doing the “to know God” part still was “learning” for me and that was fun – so no problem there. Only one thing remained blurry, but somehow didn’t seem so important. The “blur” came in seeing the “to love God” and the “to serve God” parts as different. They seemed pretty much the same to me.

A more critical question was, whether - with all this other stuff going on - I was going to have time for the second grade.

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Happy daze,

The Captain